Menu-Icons.com announces the release of Large Menu Icons, a royalty-free library of stock menu images for application developers and web designers. The new set includes 398 icons drawn in matching style, color and gamut. The Large Menu Icons collection sells for $49.00.

About Large Menu Icons

Large Menu Icons is the perfect choice for busy application and Web site developers. This collection of stock icons with matching properties such as style and colors, can be used in various projects and scripts, as well as on portals, blogs, forums, and web sites. Large Menu Icons will make an application, blog or applet look modern and consistent throughout. All icons in the Large Menu Icons collection are royalty-free. The entire collection is immediately available and comes with an online preview.

What’s Inside

The Large Menu Icons collection contains images representing all sides of the application work. Some of the icons in the set are: open, close, edit, validate, time, clock, error, OK, data, computer, archive, people, user, girl, man, admin, horse, car and more.

Technically, the set includes icons in a number of formats, sizes, color resolutions, and image styles. Every icon from the library comes in sizes of 16×16, 24×24, 32×32, 48×48 and 64×64 pixels. Normal, disabled, and highlighted versions are included for every icon. 256-color and semi-transparent True Color icons are supplied. Large Menu Icons are delivered in Windows Icon (ICO), Bitmap (BMP), GIF and PNG formats for instant integration into any systems. The entire Large Menu Icons collection is available for only $49.00. Source images are also available in SVG and AI formats for an additional payment.

Menu-Icons.com offers thousands of icons in the most difficult small resolutions. PDA and mobile developers and designers can enhance their software with smooth, perfectly rendered icons in the most convenient resolutions. Menu-Icons.com are available in all sizes common to desktop and mobile applications for mobile phones, communicators, and desktop applications. All icons offered by Menu Icons are royalty-free, ready-made and instantly available.

You’ve all seen the artist renditions. This is what Curiosity looks like to an engineer.

A few minutes into our interview last Thursday, I ask Tim Nichols, managing director of Global Aerospace, Defenses and Marine Industries at Siemens, if he was nervous about the Curiosity’s fate on Sunday. “Of course I am,” he says with a laugh, “We all know about missions to Mars — they’re complex.” None moreso than Curiosity’s elaborate landing sequence, designed to get the SUV-sized robot down safely.

He needn’t have worried. Late Sunday night, the rover successfully set down on the Martian landscape, overseen by a tense room of Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) engineers and watched by so many people here on Earth that all of NASA’s websites crashed. Like the rest of us, Nichols was glued to his screen. Unlike the rest of us, Nichols gets to say he had a hand in it. His company’s software designed Curiosity.

Curiosity is much larger than her unexpectedly long-lived predecessors, Spirit and Opportunity. This meant that she couldn’t just land bundled inside airbags like the smaller rovers.

Instead, the mission executed a complex series of maneuvers to eject the robot from its capsule and lower it to the ground, via a rocket-powered sky crane in a sequence of events that NASA called the Seven Minutes of Terror.

Curiosity was designed by the JPL at the California Institute of Technology. When it came time to coordinate the enormous team of designers and engineers that built Curiosity, the capsule, and the sky crane, JPL turned to Siemens. They needed to design the robot (relatively) cheaply and they needed to design it fast — the launch window for missions to Mars comes once every two years. If you miss the deadline, there’s a long wait ahead.
MSL Capsule with Rover NX CAE thermal model

If you squint, you can see Curiosity and the sky crane folded up together in the capsule.

Luckily, Siemens had developed software suited to this sort of project. They call it Product Lifecycle Management (PLM).

One of the costliest parts of creating a new physical product is building and testing prototypes. With PLM’s robust suite of simulators and version tracking, you can avoid a lot of physical prototyping — saving both time and money, and speeding up the development process. In essence, PLM turns the physical engineering of a product into a process that looks more and more like designing code.

PLM runs on a laptop, connected to a central asset manager, called the Team Center. Engineers can check out parts of the project, work on their problems and assignments, and then check it back in to the main branch. This allows for a lot of concurrent design work. “In the past, engineering teams would be somewhat isolated by discipline,” says Nichols, “The overall leadership recognized that they needed to bring all the groups together.”

This is a far cry from past projects, which would be designed as a series of handoffs between teams. First the thermal profiles would be worked out, then the aerodynamics, on down the line. Propagating changes between teams could become a nightmare. PLM changed all of that, Nichols says, giving the team the ability to “compress the schedule and … do many more design iterations.”
MSL NX CAD Exploded view of seperation stages

With luck, this is the only exploded view of the Mars lander that we’ll ever see.

If this sounds a lot like software engineering, especially the open source variety, it’s because it is. There’s a version control system, the ability to check code in and out of the system, and a set of test suites that allow you check the performance of your part of the module in relation to the whole. By keeping the objects in software for as long as possible, you can treat them like software, with all of the speed and flexibility that this implies.

Nichols says their suite of tools has been used to design everything from golf clubs — “Golf clubs are pretty sophisticated, though they haven’t helped my game.” — to aircraft carriers. Looking ahead, he predicts an increasing incidence of distributed international teams of contributors working on a project.
“Global virtual collaboration and engineering is really the future,” he says. “We want to see more of that.”

But first, Curiosity had to make it to Mars. “We all have our fingers crossed,” he said on Thursday. You can uncross them now, Mr Nichols.

Android or iPhone? The debate goes on and on. When the iPhone was first released, there was really no competition. Apple was playing in a class of its own. First Android devices were mediocre: sluggish UI, lags here and there, and the overall “assemble-it-yourself” approach just didn’t with consumers.

Today, the market has changed. With the latest iPhone being a superb device and a wonderful system, the latest Androids leave little to be desired. Today’s Androids have no UI lags, feature most of the same apps in the Google Play store, and went away with the do-it-yourself, LEGO type approach. Today, choosing one phone over another is more of a personal preference. Let’s try to find out what’s good about going the Apple route, and what advantages the Android way can bring.

Hardware and Model Selection

With Apple, you have a limited choice of only several models. Or, rather, you can choose from just one current model in several versions that, honestly, differ very little. There are a few older models available from the used market, but that’s about it. “You can have any color as long as it’s black”.

Android devices, on the other hand, come in all sorts of shapes, models and colors. Various manufacturers use completely different hardware. Different screens, processors, memory. Vastly different reliability and usability. Buying an Android phone will require you to do a market research, whereas you can’t go wrong with any current iPhone. Are you a techno geek or a gadget guy? Look for an Android phone that flies with you. Others will be served by Apple.

Display

The latest generation of iPhones has a great Retina display. These super high pixel density displays will display your apps, icons and pictures so crisp it’s hard to believe. Kudos to Apple: they made one of the greatest screens ever.

Androids come with all sorts of displays. Some of the better ones can match iPhones in pixel density, but software integration is still something to work on. Many apps are still using low-resolution icons and graphics designed to be shown on lower-resolution screens. When selecting an Android phone, you will have to look really carefully to buy a model with a good display. If you’re not friends with numbers, icon resolutions, angles of view and technical specs, just get an iPhone for the best screen ever.

Built-in Software and UI

An iPhone is an iPhone. They’re all the same. A single operating system, same user interface, the same set of pre-installed apps, same icons. You can customize it by shifting stuff around and choosing a few icons on your own, but there’s only so much you’re allowed to do.

Androids are available in many flavors. Different firmware and dozens of OS versions, builds and codenames. Different sets of icons for same apps. Completely different shells and launchers. Extensively customizable: you can make Android phones look like whatever you want (and it’s not just about custom icons) – but you have to know what you’re doing. With such a broad variety, some devices are simply better as in easier to use, more stable and working faster than others. If making your very own tailored environment is fun for you, by all means get the Android. If you like it working out of the box, get an iPhone and begin using it right away.

Extensibility

iPhones don’t have a slot to use an external memory card. You’ll be stuck with the amount of memory you originally bought. If you outgrow your iPhone, you’ll have to get another iPhone, bringing more money to Apple.

Most but not all Android phones come with a microSD extension slot, allowing you to add more memory when you need it. With flash memory getting cheaper every year, you will be wealthier in the long run if you get an Android.

With iPhones, you can’t even swap a battery. If your battery dies in some years (they all do; lithium batteries die in 3-4 years), you’ll be mailing your iPhone back to Apple for a “major repair” (more money to Apple), or be on the market for a new iPhone (even more money to Apple).

While some Android devices use similarly user irreplaceable batteries, most devices are easy: just lift the back cover and throw a new battery in. A replacement battery will cost a few dollars, allowing you to buy a replacement phone when you want it.

Conclusion

Android phones are more affordable to buy and cheaper to upgrade and maintain. They’re more extensible and customizable. iPhones are perfect straight out of the box, and offer one of the best usage experience ever. Which one to pick? The choice is yours.

Designing graphics on a budget has never been easy. Software developers use dozens, and often hundreds of small images (icons) throughout a single application. Custom ordering all of them makes little sense, unless you’re making a Photoshop killer or building a similarly ambitious project.

Stock icons are a perfect alternative to custom graphics for the rest of us. Stock graphics are instantly available, come with clear licensing terms, and eliminate waiting and guessing from your routine. With ready-made icons, you get exactly what you see, pay a discounted price, and receive your images in a matter of minutes – not days, weeks or months.

Every icon set is unlike another. The many collections of ready-made icon sets cover various topics, serve different platforms, and come with different licensing terms attached. And of course, the icon sets come in a wide assortment of sizes, color depths and file formats. Some icon sets are drawn better than others, and some have extra features such as a separate semi-transparent layer (the Alpha-channel) allowing the images blend smoothly with difficult backgrounds. Finding and choosing the right icon set can be just as difficult as ordering custom graphics to a designer.

Aha-Soft All Icon Sets http://www.aha-soft.com/iconsets.htm offer the ultimate answer to the entire stock icon set dilemma. This monster icon pack includes more than two hundred collections, or over 25,000 unique icons covering pretty much everything from social networks to medicine, financial and transportation applications.

All Icon Sets integrate multiple collections of icons. Each icon set is dedicated to a certain topic. There are icon sets for Windows developers, and there are icon sets for Android, Apple iOS, and Windows Phone apps, as well as Web portals, databases and online tools. No matter what platform you are targeting, All Icon Sets will have something for everyone.

With as many as 25,000 individual icons in 200 icon sets, the icon mega-pack includes images in a widest range of sizes, color depths, activity states and file formats. Depending on the target platform, the icons come in all sizes defined by the platform’s design guidelines. The sizes include resolutions of 16×16 to 512×512 pixels, depending on the platform and application of the particular icon set. The icons from All Icon Sets are provided in a combination of BMP, GIF, PNG, and Windows ICO formats. Vector sources can be provided with some icon sets including AI, SVG, PDF, CDR, XAML, 3DMax, and PSD formats.

All Icon Sets come with full-size, instant online preview. Visit http://www.aha-soft.com/iconsets.htm to check out previews, download free samples or place an order.

Shopping for ready-made icons and want the best value? Stop right here: the pack of All Menu Icons bundles 13,000 unique icons into a single value pack. How much value? If you order this pack, each icon will cost you just 3 cents.

With so many icons offered at a deeply discounted price, there must be a caveat, right? Well, let’s see. Licensing terms? All Menu Icons are royalty-free, letting you using the icons as many times and in as many projects as you need. Whether you’re developing mass-production software or designing custom Web sites, All Menu Icons will never require an extra fee. With convenient, royalty-free terms, All Menu Icons offer simply the best value among its many competitors.

Visual quality? All images comprising the All Menu Icons set are professionally designed and carefully crafted by professional designers, then assembled into matching sets for easier reference. There are numerous icons representing different visual styles, allowing you designing bright and vivid Web sites or projects with decidedly muted looks while maintaining the usual high level of visual clarity.

Technically, All Menu Icons bundle icons in multiple sizes and formats. There are five pixel resolutions (16×16, 20×20, 24×24, 32×32, and 48×48), two color depths (256-color and 32-bit color with alpha-channel), and four file formats (ICO, BMP, GIF and PNG), with separate resolutions available at an even further discount. Three visual states for Normal, Disabled and Highlighted versions of navigation elements are provided. The variations bring the total number of icons to over 600,000.

Writing about icons, reading about images or talking about images won’t tell you much about how they actually look. Visit http://www.menu-icons.com/all-menu-icons.htm to have a quick look at the preview and decide for yourself whether All Menu Icons are what you’re looking for. Didn’t find an icon you were looking for? We will make one right for you, according to your needs and specifications.

Motif narrative is an element that has used as symbolic in a story. In this way, motif narrative can help the users to produce aspects for a good theme story. A motif narrative may be evolved through the use of structural components, imaginary, and narrative elements. You can get all sort of information about motif narrative from modern American literature “green light” and it has found in the novel of The Great Gatsby which has written by F. Scott Fitzgerald.
However, the narrative can involve in multiple motifs of assortment genres. If you are looking for the Shakespeare story, you can know the using style of motif narrative. If you want to start a striking theme story, then you need to use the motif narrative type of words. In this way, you can fully maintain your striking story among all. Also, you can follow this above mention book for getting right technique to use the motif narrative in a story. Whereas it might appear interchangeable with related concept theme, term ‘motif’ does vary somewhat in the usage. Number of the narrative elements with the symbolic significance is classified as the motifs – no matter whether they are the images, spoken and written phrases, stylistic or structural devices, and other elements such as physical movement, sound, and visual components in the dramatic narratives.
The motif is not essentially the theme and latter is generally defined as the message, statement, and idea, whereas motif is detail repeated for the larger symbolic meaning, and whatever this meaning is. In some other words, the narrative motif –detail repeated in pattern of meaning – will produce the theme; however it will as well make other narrative features distinct from the theme. Nonetheless, distinction between 2 terms stays very difficult to distinguish exactly. For example, term “thematic patterning” is used to describe way where “recurrent thematic concepts” are styled to make meaning, like “moralistic motifs” that found throughout stories epic narrative Thousand n One Nights.

Android developers must meet the strict guidelines when designing icons for their mobile apps. Icon Design Guidelines for Dialog Icons specify icon resolutions and provide guidelines for choosing the color palette and visual styling of images used in pop-up dialogs and interactive prompts.

The Android OS can run on a wide range of hardware platforms equipped with screens of different pixel densities. To accommodate the wide range of displays used in the various devices running the Android OS, the guidelines specify three separate icon sizes for low-, mid- and high-definition displays. These resolutions are specified as 24×24 pixels for low-resolution displays (ldpi), 32×32 pixels for medium-resolution displays (mdpi), and 48×48 pixels for high-definition screens (hdpi).

Style wise, Android dialog icons are flat, face-on images designed with the use of a light gradient and inner shadow. These visual features allow dialog icons to stand out against a dark background. No isometric or 3D style is allowed in order to maintain a uniform look across Android-compatible apps developed by different vendors.

The Design Guidelines specify exact colors for icon’s overlay. The gradient overlay is laid out at an angle of 90 degrees. The gradient starts from the bottom as 233, 233, 233 (an R,G,B color), and goes up to 249, 249, 249 (R,G,B) at 75% to the top. The space from that point up is filled with a single color of 249, 249, 249 (R,G,B).

The inner shadow is rendered black at 25% opacity (controlled via the alpha-channel) at -90 degrees. The distance from the main picture is 1px, while the size of the shadow is 0px (meaning that the shadow is the size of the main shape itself).

Creating Android-style dialog icons is a fairly easy, step-by-step process. You can create your icons in a graphic editor such as Adobe Photoshop by downloading the Icon Templates Pack for Android 2.3 from the Android Web site. However, a raster editor may not be the perfect way, as you will end up drawing each of the three icon resolutions separately.

To save time producing the three resolutions (ldpi, mdpi and hdpi), a vector tool is advised. You can draw the basic shape of the icon in your favorite vector editor such as Adobe Illustrator and export the shape into Adobe Photoshop, rendering the vector source into the required reaolution (24×24, 32×32, or 48×48 pixels). The rest is simple: add an overlay gradient in a separate layer, and specify the appropriate inner shadow in yet another layer. Save the image as a PSD file for future editing, and export it as a PNG file with transparency enabled to add your newly created icon into your Android app.

To save time designing icons for your Android app, you may choose a ready-made collection instead. The collection of Android Dialog Icons by Aha-Soft provides 86 different icons designed in strict accordance with the Dialog Icons Design Guidelines. This royalty-free collection is supplied in the form of PNG files with alpha-channel, and offers PSD source images. In addition, scalable AI and SVG vector sources are available. You can view and purchase the set at the company’s Web site.

Using Ready-Made Images in Your Development Environment
Choosing the perfect collection of stock images was not quick or easy. But you have finally made your mind, and have purchased a perfect set to use in your application. Now when you bought the icons, how are you going to integrate them with your project? Do you know what file format should be used where, and what size, color depth or image style to embed into your project?
There are a few typical questions usually asked by developers. Where should I use 32-bit icons with alpha-channel, and why choose them over traditional 256-color images? What development environments support translucent graphics, and what file formats should be used there? Finally, which versions of stock icons to use for the many control elements? Let’s answer these questions one by one.

Picking 32-bit icons over their 8-bit versions seems easy. 32-bit icons include an extra layer defining a translucency mask. This layer is called alpha channel. Thanks to that alpha channel, images with 32-bit color depth can blend nicely with backgrounds of any color and complexity, featuring smooth edges and looking great even if your background has a busy color, gradient, or has an image or pattern. In addition, the alpha channel makes shadows and reflections appear semi-transparent, making them look natural and overall rendering extremely realistic.
So, 32-bit icons are just the right type to use. The real question is if you will be able to use them for your project. In reality, 32-bit graphics can be used in most situations – and cannot be used in others. If you’re making a Web site, then chances are that your target audience already has a compatible browser installed that can display 32-bit icons with full alpha-channel support. Exceptions are rare, and include Internet Explorer 6 and earlier versions, ancient builds of Mozilla, and a few resource-limited mobile browsers (although most mobile platforms can perfectly show 32-bit images).

For Web use, you should use 32-bit icons in PNG format. If maintaining support for really old browsers is important, you can fall back to 24-bit PNG icons, converting the original 32-bit images with an icon editing tool such as IconLover. 8-bit GIF files can be used for producing light Web sites to be displayed on the slowest mobile platforms. Note that GIF files don’t have a full alpha-channel support; instead, they feature a single-bit transparency mask. Again, you can convert your 8-bit icons from 32-bit originals with IconLover, or use the GIF versions of icons supplied with your icon set. The GIF icons provided with your set will look fine on most types of backgrounds, but you can produce your own versions if you need a busy or colourful background and want your icons blend with it.

Windows applications can normally only use a specific kind of file depending on what exactly you’re going to use it for. For example, ICO files are normally used as application icons. ICO files pack the same image (or, sometimes, different images) in a number of sizes and color depths within a single file. Windows will automatically choose the appropriate size and color depth depending on the user’s screen settings and the location of the icon. It’s best to include all standard sizes and color resolutions in an ICO file. Our stock icons already have all standard resolutions and color depths stored in the ICO format; if you want to build your own ICO, you can use IconLover.

Find Royalty-Free Graphics on Your Computer
Sib Icon Catalog indexes hundreds of royalty-free graphic collections and thousands of individual graphics, making it simple to search images and order images you need. All icons indexed by Sib Icon Catalog come straight from the source, with on-time delivery guarantee, pre-sale and after-sale customer support and no strings attached.
Ready-made stock images are a great way to save on image design. Available immediately, ready-made icons are a perfect way to meet the deadline – no matter how close it might be. However, not all stock graphics are made equal.

Ready-made graphics vary in appearance, technical parameters, and licenses. Some graphic sets are available on per-use basis, and some require licensing fees, or royalties, paid as a commission from every sale of a product using those images. It is in the best interest of those buying graphics to avoid companies demanding royalty payments.

There are, of course, plenty of royalty-free ready-made icons on the Web. In fact, there are so many that it is simple to get lost. Googling for stock icons returns hundreds of thousands of results. Are there that many image makers? Not really. Many stock images are sold through various affiliate schemes with often undisclosed licensing terms and conditions and dubious customer support.

Finding quality ready-made graphics with good licensing terms and appropriate technical parameters such as resolution and image format support becomes difficult. Here comes Sib Icon Catalog. Designed SibCode, Sib Icon Catalog contains hundreds of royalty-free ready-made graphic collections and thousands of individual icons, making it easy to search icons and pick graphics you need. All icons indexed by Sib Icon Catalog come straight from the designer, with on-time delivery guarantee, pre-sale and after-sale customer support. Needless to say, all graphics in the Sib Icon Catalog database come with a very straightforward license allowing customers to use them in as many products, Web sites, or other media as needed without paying any royalties or additional license fees.

Sib Icon Catalog makes it easy to find ready-made images, choose and purchase icons with full instant previews. Thousands of full-size images are included with Sib Icon Catalog with no watermarks. All icons are carefully tagged, making it simple to search for the right icon. Sib Icon Catalog helps designers and webmasters to meet the toughest deadlines with on-time delivery guarantee. One can cselect and purchase icons and image packages directly from Sib Icon Catalog.

All software icons indexed by Sib Icon Catalog are technically sound, coming in numerous sizes, file formats, versions, and color depths. Typically, every image or icon set comes in ICO, GIF, PNG, and BMP formats in three versions: standard, highlighted, and grayed out. Icons of 16×16 to 256×256 pixels are available in both 256-color and 32-bit True Color resolutions. Sib Icon Catalog is absolutely free and can be downloaded at sibcode.com.

File icons are a crucial component of nearly every application developed today, and impressing users with something fresh and new can say a lot about the application’s style and quality. Choosing professionally-designed file icons like those found in our large collection can help make any program or project take on an appealing look without sacrificing important issues of usability.

Our file icon set includes graphics for many basic functions, such as saving, opening, creating, and deleting files, and also features several icons for conveying information to users precisely and clearly. From text importation and exportation icons to various reports and lists, this set will keep you covered as you assign icons to your application’s toolbar options. The availability of three specific transparency modes for each article, including normal, highlighted, and gray scale, will help make your menu look more organized.

Each toolbar icon in this set features an easy-to-understand graphic that lets your users easily associate them with the unique functions and options of your program. The icons’ uniformly smooth edges offer a polished look that will add a great sense of style to any project. Perfect looks are matched by perfect usability in this collection, and you can count on having the right graphic every time you add a new option to your menu.

All of our file icons are available in a range of sizes. Choose from 16 by 16, 20 by 20, 24 by 24, 32 by 32, or 48 by 48 to achieve the best look possible in any visual environment. The icons’ beautiful, eye-catching colors support both 256 and 32-bit True Color, and every piece in the set can be found in regular, hot, and disabled modes. These distinct transparencies let you visually define the status of any option while keeping the same great looks. Icons also come in ICO, PNG, and BMP formats.

Your project can greatly benefit from the stylish looks and clear symbology of these professional file icons.